Which Type of CRM Is Best for You?

Are you trying to choose a CRM? Are you overwhelmed by the hundreds of sound CRMs available? So were we! That’s why this article outlines the CRM landscape and presents CRM software examples, so that you can navigate the increasingly crowded market to find the best CRM for you.

What Is a CRM?

CRMs enable individuals and teams to manage professional (and personal) relationships to achieve certain goals. Although CRM is an abbreviation of “Customer Relationship Management”, the CRM landscape has evolved to address a much broader spectrum of relationship management needs. Today CRMs can be used not only for sales, marketing and customer support, but also to manage professional relationships with investors, candidates, partners, alumni and more.

How To Choose a CRM?

Here is a checklist of questions to ask yourself when choosing a CRM:

What do you want to achieve by using (or switching) CRMs?
What will you be using your CRM for? Define concrete use-cases.
What are your core vs. nice-to-have features?

With a clear idea of your objectives and essential CRM features, you can narrow down your search to which type of CRM offers them. Otherwise, you could feel like me in Sephora, aimlessly shopping for lipstick and not knowing where to start.

What Types of CRMs Are There?

To simplify your search, we’ve put together our take on the CRM landscape. The different types of CRMs include:

Sales & Marketing CRMs
CRMs for Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Industry-specific CRMs
No-code CRMs
Messenger CRMs
Email add-on CRMs
Personal CRMs

1. Sales & Marketing CRMs

The most common type of CRM enables teams to drive top line growth with sales and marketing. Sales CRMs like Salesforce manage the sales cycle by tracking leads, building pipelines and storing customer data. Marketing CRMs like Lemlist focus more on automating personalised outreaches. However, most CRMs offer a combination of sales and marketing features. Ultimately, these CRMs aim to reduce the admin burden of sales and biz dev agents, so they can spend more time with potential clients.

2. CRMs for Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business strategy where the product itself becomes the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. PLG CRMs are designed to deliver a seamless user experience, self-service support, and data-driven product improvements to drive user adoption and growth. They target product-led businesses like Slack and Spotify, which offer a freemium model where users can access basic features for free, leading to a large user base that can experience the product’s value. PLG CRMs help these businesses increase revenue by tracking product-qualified leads (customers on a free plan) and converting them to paying models.

3. Industry-specific CRMs

Industry-specific CRMs target industries with particular CRM needs such as venture capital, recruiting, and real estate. These industries have distinct workflows and requirements that are not adequately addressed by one-size-fits-all CRMs. This is primarily due to the need for extensive customisation or absence of certain integrations or automations in generic CRMs.

For example, multi-purpose sales CRMs like Hubspot or Pipedrive are not an ideal solution for deal flow management in venture capital firms. Instead, venture capital firms tend to prefer specialised CRMs that provide data enrichment on startups and deal flow analytics. Read about the Best CRMs for Venture Capital to get CRM software examples for investors.

4. No-code CRMs

In popular no-code tools such as Notion and Airtable you can build a CRM from scratch to manage certain groups of contacts and workstreams. The upside of no-code CRMs is that they are fully customisable and don’t require another software subscription, so your team saves money 🤑. The downside of no-code CRMs is that your team will invest a lot more time in setting up and keeping the CRM up to date. We have shortlisted some no-code CRM software examples within the Best CRMs for Startups.

5. Omnichannel CRMs

Omnichannel CRMs help businesses manage client relationships across different channels in one place. Omnichannel CRMs like Respond.io enable companies to bring sales, marketing and customer support to the platforms where clients are actually active, such Whatsapp, Facebook and Telegram. In contrast to traditional email marketing, where the open rate averages 20%, messenger channels boast a 98% message visibility. These types of CRMs are used by airlines, banks, healthcare, hotels, telecommunications, etc.

6. Email CRMs

Email CRMs enhance the management and organisation of your mailbox, providing additional features and functionality to streamline workflows within your mailbox. There are two types of email CRMs: plugins like Streak that add enhanced features to your existing mailbox, and email software like Superhuman, that provides a separate mailbox to consolidate multiple accounts. Both types of CRMs for email meticulously organise your inbox, offer templates/snippets and show email open rate, ultimately saving you hours of tedious work every week.

7. Personal CRMs

While most types of CRMs focus on supercharging teams, personal CRMs enable individuals to manage their professional and personal relationships. Personal CRMs can be used to structure your network, note personal details about contacts and set reach-out reminders to not miss birthdays. Personal CRMs are especially popular amongst professionals in industries where personal relationships are critical to success. For more detail about personal CRMs like Clay, read our article about the best Personal CRMs.

Tip: Once you’ve shortlisted a couple of CRMs, test them out by enrolling in a free trial or scheduling a live demo.